Black Hole

I'm in my early twenties, sitting in my Literary Criticism class with one of my favorite professors. I've spent the first part of the class discussing Kate Millet's Sexual Politics. I'm pretty fired up, as I always am when we're discussing gender, sex, politics, and writing. Somehow the conversation takes a turn toward the movie The Notebook, which another student recently recommended (idiotically) to our feminist firecracker of a professor. When we start discussing the movie, the professor gets really wound up and eventually shouts, SHOUTS at us:

"Come on you guys! This is like dumping laudanum on your ice cream!"

The class dissolves into silence and then raucous laughter. Everyone picks up their pens and scribbles the quote down in the margins of their texts. We collect ourselves and resume the thread of the conversation.

I've never forgotten that professor's description of romantic comedies, partly because it's hilarious and partly because it's so apt.

***

"So, what does Mr. Right look like?" 

My therapist and I have been talking at length about loneliness and isolation before she asks the question. I, still incapable of not being a smartass, answer:

"Ryan Gosling." 

We sit quietly for a minute and she rolls her eyes at me, which is my cue to stop being flippant. 

"Smart. Preferably a little smarter than I am or smarter in a different way so I don't get lazy. Well-read." I pause. "Articulate and equally ambitious. Funny and interested in science-fiction and board games and going for walks after dinner."

We talk a little more about what I expect out of my romantic partners and whether or not I'll be able to find someone in a city as small as the one I'm living in currently (short answer, no.) We finish our session and I put in my headphones and turn up my coat collar for the walk home. 

As I'm walking I think about what I held back in that session. After all, it wouldn't be me unless I refused to disclose some tiny part of what I was thinking. In this case it was that I want the proverbial laudanum my ice cream.

Not all of me and not all the time. Most of the time, I want exactly what I told my therapist I want: an intellectually stimulating, emotionally and sexually satisfying man in my life. Who likes jazz. And science-fiction. But there's this tiny part of me, a part that often goes unacknowledged, who wants to be carried away. 

Let's be honest, that Kelly is kind of a dope. Inclined to pop-sentimentality and gooey love songs, romance novels and daydreaming, she's a real drag to be around. She starts nattering on about surprise trips to Paris with her hypothetical boyfriend. She sighs, audibly, during parts of Pride and Prejudice she's seen/read so many times she can recite them from memory. 

Thankfully, that Kelly doesn't have a whole lot of resiliency. She can usually be dealt with by putting on a Bessie Smith album. 

***

I feel like I'm letting the home team down lately. 

After a lot of hard work, my career feels like it's finally going in the direction I want. I have incredible friends. My OCD is slowly coming under control. I've discovered in the past few months that I'm a pretty tough person. I have all of these things heading in exactly the direction I want them to be heading. I'm really proud of the challenges I've faced, the risks I've taken, the things I've achieved.  By all accounts I should be happy. 

No, it's not that I'm unhappy. I'm . . . wistful, maybe. A little too inclined to go back and read old love letters and think about what old boyfriends are doing now. A little too teary at weddings. Feeling a touch too much like I want to watch Bridget Jones's Diary. 

It's the wistfulness that I find troubling, the fact that I feel like something is missing from my life because ohmygodhowfuckingclichedcanyouget? I might as well put on a pair of yoga pants and eat an entire pint of ice cream. Covered in laudanum. 

It's my hangup, of course. But from the conversations I've had, it seems like it's the hangup a lot of smart, successful, single women have. It's as though we've all acknowledged that we're bright, capable, for-the-most-part together ladies and that's what we project to our families, friends, coworkers, whomever. And that's great, because that's who we are. Yet at the same time, we all seem to have made the decision that the bright, capable, for-the-most-part together ladies are the only aspects of ourselves we're allowed to show the world. Ever. We've bought into the bullshit that in order to be successful and respected we can't expose these small parts of ourselves that need to be loved and cared for to other people. Because the second you say "Yes, I'd like to be dating someone" or "Yes, living alone can be really lonely" what you're really saying, or what people perceive you as saying is "Oh my God. I need a boyfriend six weeks ago and I'm going to settle for the first guy who comes along because I'm lonely and desperate for companionship." 

Suddenly, instead of being the woman who's single by choice or inclination you're the friend who's single because she's a huge swirling vortex of neediness. A relationship black hole and any guy who gets too close is going to experience emotional and mental spaghettification. 

This, of course, isn't the reality. Or rather, it's not the reality of who all of us are as people. It's the reality that's been put forth in those laudanum-on-your-ice cream movies. And while none  few of the women I know who admit to occasionally feeling lonely or isolated or who just want to be dating someone are actually at emotional black hole, I think we all fear being perceived as it.

 As a side note, I wonder if men feel the same way, or if this is just the gift that entertainment has given women.

Back to my point. It's this emotional clusterfuck that has me feeling like I'm letting down the feminist side of things. The part of me that wants to be swept up, swept away, the part of me that was raised on princess movies and who still reads romance novels is slowly becoming more resilient, less inclined to be silenced by a blues record. That Kelly is not a bad person. Sure, she's a little dopey, a little dreamy, but she's also a hell of a lot more sincere and less jaded and less angry. There's nothing anti-feminist about wanting to fall in love in that breath-taking, heart-stopping, annoying way in which I like to fall in love. Just like there's nothing inherently feminist in listening to Graveyard Blues.

Pass the ice cream. 

Wild & Young

"I don't know, Kel." My father and I are having our one serious conversation a year that isn't about work or John Axford's ERA.

It's a few days before Christmas, the one time of year where my father and I can have serious conversations without fighting. Every year we go out Christmas shopping for my mom together. It's one of my favorite holiday traditions, partly because my father loves Christmas. Something about the season makes it so that this trip, this one time out of the year, we can actually talk to one another. We've been shopping for his Christmas presents for Mom together ever since I was a little girl, and I've never told him, but it's the best Christmas gift I get.

This year we're talking about relationships and marriage. I tell him one of the best things about growing up with them as parents has been that my brothers and I have felt very little pressure to grow up in the conventional settle-down-have-kids-and-buy-a-house kind of way. Their attitude made it possible for me to go to school out of state, live in China, settle down here in Minnesota, get a graduate degree, move around often, and live a life of my own choosing.

He;s thoughtful "I met your mother at 24." He pauses and says to himself "I think she saved my life."

My father, particularly in his early years, is an enigma. I've heard bits and pieces of his early life, a little about how he met Mom, and snippets of stories about aunts and uncles here and there. I know that he was laid off from his job in his early twenties and lived on a beach in Belize for a few months. He would go down to the Kentucky Derby as a road trip with his friends every a year for many years. He was wild and young and making what appear to him retrospectively to be bad decisions and somehow my mother fell into his life.

She was no angel herself. A disco queen with an affinity for shoes, nail polish, and big hair she made her own youthful, rash decisions. But somehow the pair of them clicked and settled down and built a life together. I would have thought that after over thirty years of marriage, they would know all there is to know about one another. I've wondered a few times whether or not they've ever grown tired of one another's jokes and stories over the course of their marriage, if they've ever longed for the thrill that comes when you meet someone new. A few years ago Mom said something to me I've never forgotten.

"Your father," she said, looking up from her knitting, "is a very different person than the man I fell in love with."

I'm a little nervous about where this conversation is going. My mother is known for weird, slightly embarrassing non sequiturs, for instance, leaning over in the middle of Mass to ask when you last moved your bowels.

She continues, "It's like getting to fall in love with him all over again."

***

I'm driving back from Minneapolis, feeling more than a little wistful. I've spent the past three days in the company of the people I love tremendously, the people I refer to as my Minnesota family. It's always hard to leave them behind, but today on my friend Nick's birthday, a few days after he and Victoria announced their engagement, it's really difficult. I'm a weird mix of happy and sad, and I can't quite identify why I'm feeling the way I am. It's a good distance from Minneapolis to the North Country, and during the winter, night comes on quickly. By the time I start getting into town, the winter light is fading rapidly.

And it happens.

There have, for me, always been songs that are right for whatever period of my life. In high school, it was any song by the band Thursday. In college "Nobody Knows Me," by the Weepies. Graduate school was, hands down, the song "Wagon Wheel" by Old Crow Medicine Show. Whenever those songs came on the radio, I had to listen to them all the way to the end. For whatever reason, whether teenage angst or good memories associated with them, the songs were (and still are) just right for that time in my life.

Anyway, I'm coming down the hill into my adoptive city when the song for this part of my life comes on the radio. And I realize why I have this funny wistful feeling. Regardless of what happens in the next few years, I think that this is going to be the part of my life that I always look back on with a certain fondness. Realistically, the last couple years have been challenging. God knows I've blogged enough about those challenges. But this is also the first time I can remember by life being wholly and completely my own. While I have obvious responsibilities (bills, family, work) those responsibilities are relatively minimal. I've spent the past year and a half without having to do homework or look after children or worry about whether or not my boyfriend is going to be pissed about the dishes in the sink.

I say this with utter sincerity (all the while feeling a bit hokey.) I feel like right now anything is possible. I could write a best-selling memoir and become a famous writer. Go back to school and become a noted astrophysicist. Close a million dollar gift. Make a difference in the lives of women and children. And those aspirations are good ones, they're ones I feel like I can be proud of, but even they don't encompass the whole of what I've trying to talk about.

I feel like I finally understand the gift of youth. That the dance parties we have in Victoria and Nick's basement, the long nights spent debating politics and religion over many glasses of wine, the cigars smoked while talking about art and love and life, these are all things that are possible in this way only right now, only because we're young. Of course they'll happen later in life too. One cannot surround oneself with interesting, intelligent, engaged people and expect them to become less so just because they get married, buy houses, have children. But whether it's the new year or number of engagements that have happened recently or confronting the mortality of someone I love, these recent months feel blessed in a way I neither anticipated nor recognized until now. It's as though something clicked in the past year or so and I've finally given myself permission to commit all of those youthful indiscretions I feel like I've missed.

***

Since their children have moved out of the house, Mom and Daddy have taken some amazing trips. Somewhere around their 25th wedding anniversary, my father bought a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and my parents have taken to taking cross-country motorcycle trips to listen to blues, eat BBQ, and generally act like young adults. They called me once at 2 am after a Springsteen concert, waking me up with the screaming and noise of motorcycles in the background. They are as lovey-dovey as a pair teenagers, which is simultaneously sweet and gross. 

I wonder what my parents would have thought of one another if Daddy hadn't lived like a drifter for a few months, if Mom had gone out a little less. It would be reductionist to say that they wouldn't have fallen in love and I wouldn't have been born and wocca wocca wocca. But I can't help but wonder if my mother would have asserted so firmly that she has continued falling in love with my father throughout the years if he hadn't started out a much different person than the man he's become. 

The gift my parents have started giving me as I've gotten older is more profound than they'll ever realize. The stories of their youthful indiscretions, of the mistakes they made, of the chances they took are a revelation. These stories are, whether they realize it or not, reinforcing that while my own story, my own youthful indiscretions may not lead to finding my one true love or settling anywhere close to their home, they're worth experiencing regardless. 

And they're teaching me that even when you get older, even when you've been in a committed relationship for 30+ years, have raised children, struggled through adulthood, and do all of the things that I dread, perhaps you still don't have to give up those memories of when you were wild and young.

Food

I'm munching on some dried apples, trying to take the edge off of my appetite while my andouille sausage and spinach stuffed squash bakes away in the oven. I'm making do, making up an recipe with the discrete objects I still have in the freezer/on the kitchen counter from before I went on vacation a week ago. Except the dried apples. Those are my answer to kettle chips, the junk food Kryptonite to my Superman.

I love food. 

My enthusiasm for food and cooking is reflected in my Christmas gifts from the past couple years. Many of them come from Sur la Table, a store I could spend an entire afternoon in happily. There are candy making spoons, tart pans, fancy cake pans, new pots, a marble pastry board, a Kitchenaid, and Mastering the Art of French Cooking (thanks, Mom!)

I love cooking. I love having other people cook for me. I love walking into someone's house in a sundress in late August with a lattice-top peach pie. I love showing my love and appreciation for someone by inviting them into my kitchen when I don my damask apron, crank up Ella Fitzgerald, and make onion soup and coq au vin to make you weep. 

I love eating what other people cook for me. Laughing out loud when I  find out that the impossibly tender and flavorful Dijon chicken and asparagus I'm eating was cooked in the microwave. Tasting a family recipe that someone learned to cook at the elbow of a loved one. Seeing a new cook execute a tricky recipe for the first time.

I love cooking with other cooks and listening to their stories. How the crepe pan belonged to someone's mother and they used to get crepes on Bastille Day. How a meal brought a couple together. How one cook blew up at another and dumped a pan full of olive oil into his soup. 

I love food. 

I fear food. 

I fear food in the way that only a girl who weighs over 110 pounds and has shopped at the Uptown H&M can fear food. 

I worry about the calories in the cream and sugar I add to my afternoon cup of tea. I can't eat a cookie without counting up the calories in my head. Sometimes I have popcorn for dinner because it's objectively awesome and sometimes I have popcorn for dinner because I had a rich or heavy lunch or a late afternoon candy bar. I rarely keep things like kettle chips or ice cream in the house. The least healthy thing you will find here is a bag of popcorn that needs to be popped on the stove (because then I have to decide if I really want it) and hot chocolate that I keep to curb my sweet tooth.  

In quite possibly the worst or best decision I've ever made, I now keep my scale in my kitchen. I weigh myself every single day. When I'm thinking about after-dinner ice cream, I have to walk right past the scale before I can get to the freezer. Possibly unbalanced? Yes. Best weight-maintenance decision I've ever had? Absofuckinglutely.

A few months ago I decided that I was going to start "writing dangerously." The decision was more or less concurrent with my decision to go into therapy and the realization that maybe never telling anyone what was going on in my head was a bad idea. As a result, many of these recent posts have been more confessional than I ever intended for this blog. It's been a complicated process. A) I'm naturally a taciturn person B) I'm worried that my writing is, as a result of dealing with all these feelings, going down the shitter. C) This process has been therapeutic in a way I'll never be able to describe. D) I don't know if I want my writing to be my therapy process.

I'm inclined to these kinds of false dichotomies in my thinking. I can write about my feelings or I can bee a good writer. I can eat this cookie and still have dinner and be a fatty for the rest of my life or I can skip two meals today because I had an afternoon cookie. I can be successful in all aspects of my life by projecting the supremely confident, funny, smart girl that I am 70% of the time or I can admit that I'm sometimes a shrieking void of insecurity and doubt and will die old and alone, without even the cliched cats because I'm allergic to everything fluffy and adorable.

My relationship with food is probably the best (and worst) illustration of this crazy schizophrenic thinking to which I've suddenly become inclined. I would have never noticed it if my shrink hadn't suggested that I track my panic attacks and see what the triggers were. With the exception of all the worries about my loved one's health and the attendant panic that's occurring there, every single panic attack I've had has occurred after I eat.

What. The Actual  Fuck. How did I get to a point in my life where doing something that I used to enjoy, something that is, I don't know, NECESSARY TO CONTINUE LIVING, became something that I've so pathologized that I cannot do it without feeling like I may be dying when I finish? Might this indicate that it may be time to take the scale out of the kitchen? On a bigger level, to quit with the nutty dichotomies in my thinking?

Absofuckinglutely. 

All of You

I am the black sheep of one side of my family.

I'm in my late twenties and unmarried. I don't have kids. I seem to be allergic to serious relationships. When I was talking to a family member about my recent whirl-wind trip to New Orleans I said that I had never been so grateful to be unattached, childless, and without a pet in my entire life.

She rolled her eyes. I gracefully changed the subject to her grandchildren.

In a similar conversation with my younger brother and father I said, a little flippantly, "I can barely even balance my own checkbook, what the hell would I want a boyfriend for?"

My family doesn't miss a beat. "To balance your checkbook."

"My hypothetical family," I reply, "is going to be a two bank account kind of a household."

They roll their eyes. I gracefully change the subject to baseball.

Let's be honest. I've got some relationship hurdles to clear. I'm a recovering Catholic with all the attendant hangups that come with being a recovering repressed Catholic. I'm convinced that anyone who comes home with me that I haven't known for a billion years is secretly a serial killer. I talk about space constantly. My younger brother gave me a USS Enterprise Christmas ornament and I almost cried out of sheer happiness. I can be the worst frickin' culture snob. I sing constantly and completely out of key.

Charming, huh?

Additionally, I've never met a married couple and thought to myself "Yes! That is a totally stable and sane relationship. I WANT THAT RIGHT NOW AND FOREVER." I say this with all due respect to my parents and many of the lovely married couples I've met. Their relationships, while they may be stable or sane or perhaps both, are not what I have in mind for relationships I want to be committed to for the rest of my life.

In addition to the aforementioned problems (as if those weren't enough) I identified another, um, hurdle over the past couple weeks. While I was with my social worker friends last week, I brought up a question that appeared when I registered for online dating. The question was, essentially, "your partner has a minimum wage job and no ambition to ever have a higher paying/more prestigious/world-changing position. Would this bother you?" My answer, shockingly, was "Totally unacceptable."

Some of my friends have really run me through the wringer over this one, indicating that someone's work doesn't necessarily have to do with their ambition and they might be interesting and blah blah blah. All right, I'm not so shallow that I want my hypothetical boyfriend to make tons of money at a soul-crushing job just for the sake of money and power. But I want them to have work that they find interesting and meaningful and, quite frankly, that I can be proud of them for doing.

I asked the question to my social worker friends and praise be to the gods above, they agreed with me. That wasn't entirely unexpected, but it's nice to have independent verification that you aren't a vicious harpy because you expect your signif to be ambitious. My friend Carliene put it best. Women like us are running at top speed most of the time. If you can't have someone who can keep up, you might as well be speaking different languages.

I've spent my entire life as a skeptic of the "one true love" or "love at first sight" kinds of stories. Partially, I suspect, because my parents are utterly forthcoming about how they both kept dating other people after they met. Partially because I'm just a skeptic. I mean, one true loves and love a first sights make for great music and books (Ugh. The Night Circus. *pfffffffffffffft*) but in real life? And if those things aren't real, what's the point in mingling lifestyles and credit scores and DNA?

***

I'm the Grinch of weddings.

Don't get me wrong. I love wedding receptions, provided the music is danceable or I know most of the people in attendance. But that doesn't keep me from mulling over divorce rates while I'm sitting through a Roman Catholic wedding mass or watching the first couple dance to some terrible Tim McGraw song (honestly, people, Ella Fitzgerald has some beautiful love songs.) It sounds and is horrible, but I can't help but think about all of the weddings I've been to where the bride and groom are clearly not suited to one another and wasted their life savings on a huge, expensive, crazy party that they'll look back on and regret.

For the record, it's not every wedding that has me contemplating divorce attorney's rates and how much your credit score drops when you do divorce. It's just some and the thoughts come to mind completely unbidden.

You know what? I'm going to stop justifying this. Just don't invite me to your wedding.

***

A few years ago a friend of mine called to announce that she was engaged.

I started crying over the phone.

I was crying out of happiness.

I love this woman. I love her husband. I love them both so much it makes my heart hurt. Their wedding was one of the happiest, most joy and grace-filled experiences of my life. When my friends get together and we talk about the best wedding we've ever been to, we roundly agree on this one. It was incredible because of the people getting married and the obvious love that they have for one another. But it was equally incredible because of the generosity and love they showed for their friends and family and their friends and family showed for them.

For many years this was an atypical wedding for me. Many of the "celebrations" I attended included bridal freakouts, family drama on the dance floor, weird wedding party dynamics, etc ad nauseam. However, as my Minnesota family--the friends with whom I'm closest and love the most--are slowly getting engaged and planning their weddings, I'm discovering that those weddings, the dramatic, overblown, overly expensive affairs, are the exceptions. The other weddings, the ones that are full of love and respect and joy are becoming (thankfully) more common.

Oddly enough, the more of these weddings that I attend, the more convinced I become that love at first sight and one true love don't actually exist. Or perhaps they do, but they look a lot different than I always imagined. Instead of shared bank accounts and, I don't know, saving one another from huge-unconquerable-on-your-own problems, it's separate banks accounts and sixty hour work weeks and still taking a lot of meaning from your job. But also, curling up together in front of an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation and learning, day by day, that the one you love is not, in fact, going to kill you in your sleep.

At least, that's what I'm hoping it is.

With a Little Help

The day I received a key to Victoria and Nick's house was one of the happiest days of my life.

 To clarify, their house is the epicenter of my life in Minneapolis. They've let me crash on their guest bed more times than I can count, they never get upset at me when I make a giant mess out of their kitchen, and they don't mind letting me have free run of the house while they go along with their normal weekend plans.

More than anything though, their house is a place where I know I can truly come as I am, regardless of what that might entail.

My social circle when I'm in the city revolves around a six or so block radius around their house and whenever I'm in town we do much the same things. Cook, eat, laugh, drink wine, make inappropriate jokes, and academically parse comic books or kink or writing or history. It's fun and always a relief to be among people I love and trust.

Anyway, about a month ago, Victoria gave me a key to the house and I almost cried. Because she gave the key with the expectation that I would use it to come and go as I wanted. And because her home and this neighborhood in South Minneapolis feel more like home than where I'm living now. It sounds a little overwrought, I know, but receiving this key felt like coming home.

I come from a pretty independent family. We reroof our own houses, fix our own cars, butcher our own venison, and generally handle things one our own. It's been a point of pride for me, as I've grown into adulthood, to learn how to haggle with landlords, work with banks, juggle work and a social life and a nascent spiritual journey without relying on a whole lot of people.

In conjunction with self-reliance, I tend to be a deeply private person. I may write a first-person blog, but I keep Back many of the salient details behind the stories I tell here. Once, after breaking up with someone I had been dating for six-ish months, I lamented the emotional catastrafuck of breakups to a friend and she replied "I didn't even realize you were in a relationship."

Like I said, private.

I feel like the luckiest person in the world. I have interesting, passionate, engaged, stimulating people in my life. I also have people with pretty highly tuned bullshit detectors in my life. In the past few weeks two close friends, both social workers who live out of state, asked how I've been. When I told them I was coping their responses where, essentially, "bullshit, we'll be on the next bus to see you." When they arrived they didn't pull any of their social worker shit on me. We didn't talk about my feelings or my deep-rooted fear of death or my anxiety disorder. I made them dinner. We exchanged lots of hugs. When I had a minor meltdown about (and not about) packing for the holidays, Krista packed my suitcase for me. We told bawdy stories and they straightened my hair. 

It's hard to describe what's been going on for me, emotionally, over the past few weeks. On one side, there's all of this emotionally draining chaos. On the other, there is an incredible network of support and love that I always new existed in theory, but is suddenly here in reality. I feel, I suspect, not unlike a scientist whose experimental data finally proves a hypothesis they've always suspected to be true. The people I love have come through for me in amazing, breath-taking ways. There have been the big things, like a last minute trip to New Orleans, but there have been a lot of very small things that make life just a bit easier too. A packed suitcase. A new Garrison Keillor book. Emails with links to pictures from NASA. Texts that say, simply "I love you." 

A month ago, when Victoria and Nick gave me a key to their house, I realized that home doesn't have to be the place where you grew up or even where you currently reside. My family, my blood relations, taught me self-sufficiency. My other family, the ones who live in El Paso and Boston, Minneapolis and Oklahoma City, are teaching me that while self-sufficiency is appropriate in a lot of circumstances, it's all right to get by with a little help from my friends.

Pineapple

It's the night before my loved one goes in for a cancer biopsy. I am functioning at my absolute lowest level, which is to say hardly functioning at all. I'm drinking tea, playing Tetris, and trying to avoid talking to anyone when my phone rings. It's my best friend of fourteen years and I know why she's calling. She's worried about how I'm dealing. I don't particularly want to talk, but answer to let her know I'm, you know, not crawling into a bottle of bourbon. We chat for a bit and when I get ready to say goodbye, she says "Hang on, I still have something to say to you."

She offers me a free plane ticket to New Orleans. For three days from now.

I turn her down.

I intimated in one of my earlier posts that the past couple months have been chaotic at best. In the interest of full disclosure, I will now say that November-December have been the worst fucking months of my life.

Someone I love has cancer and I am literally just waiting to find out of it's the horrible, contemplate-life-without-them kind of scary or the more easily treatable but still unwelcome kind of scary. I've never been as busy at work as I am right now. I can't get my own mental health shit under control and have had panic attacks on an average of two per day for the past three weeks. I haven't had a full night's sleep since late October. Due to all of the stress and madness going on right now, I can't seem to get physically well. I haven't seen my mom since August and I miss her so much that it's hard to breathe.

Also, have I mentioned that it won't stop snowing in Minnesota?

In a recent email to a friend I described myself using Jane Austen's characters. "In my mind, I'm Elizabeth Bennett. In real life, I'm probably more of a Fanny Price."

Fanny Price, for those of you who aren't Janeites, is the main character of Mansfield Park. She's reserved and deeply, painfully shy. She also happens to be an incredible listener (we introverts tend to be) and as a result the people in her life pour their guts out to her.

Like Fanny, I spend a lot of time listening. I try to avoid giving advice because I never feel like I'm getting the entire story. Additionally, I ate a cookie for breakfast this morning. I have no business giving advice about jobs or weddings or relationships to anyone. So I spend a lot of time listening and making empathetic noises. Chiming in when someone makes an utterly irrational claim and trying to steer them back on the path. It's a nice arrangement. The vast majority of my friends are external processors and are people with a lot of, um, emotions. They get someone to vent to and I get to feel like I'm actually being helpful.

Being the quiet, reasonable, available one has its drawbacks. I seem to find myself as the go-between for breakups more often than I would like. There are people in my life who are so emotional that I find myself absolutely, completely unable to sympathize with them in any meaningful way. As a result, I've become an obsessive call-screener.

To digress, I recognize that my own personal brand of repression and avoidance isn't the best case scenario. However. I don't really do crying unless someone has died or your marriage is heading towards divorce or your dissertation advisory committee has just torpedoed you or you've just watched David Tennant's final episode of Doctor Who.

The final and at present most difficult drawback is that when people are used to confiding in you it can be challenging to create your own emotional space. As I've been struggling to sort out my own emotions surrounding this cancer diagnosis, people are still confiding in me and it's not that I think what they're dealing with, be it a breakup or a fender bender, isn't important. It's that I have zero emotional energy to invest in anyone else right now. It's frustrating because I never developed the ability to say "I don't have time for you right now." I had sort of hoped that saying "I'm waiting to hear if someone close to me is going to have to go in chemo and radiation therapy" would do the trick, but we can all be a little self-involved at times. For God's sake, I write a blog. In first person. I know what it's like to be self-obsessed.

The worst part of all of this is that my reactions to other people have been so skewed. I am viciously angry when someone I've confided it about the details of this illness and the person suffering from it asks me how I'm doing, but when someone else asks to to proofread a graduate school paper or help them write a grant, things that objectively take more time and energy, I'm fine. It isn't rational. None of these emotions are rational. This illness this person is suffering from isn't rational.

When my best friend called with her Oprah moment my immediate, instinctive response was rational. I have a ton of work to do, I'm unlikely to be good company, I can't take Monday off at the last moment, I already made plans with other people for the weekend, Christmas is in just over a week and I have a million and six things to do before I can take off for the holidays, I should be spending hotel money on Christmas presents, etc. I made a rational decision not to take her up on her offer of a free plane ticket.

Shortly before Michelle called I had a long conversation with a very good friend, someone who is, if anything, taking up negative emotional space in my life right now. What I mean is despite living hundreds of miles away, she's helping me deal with all my shit in amazing, supportive ways. She is a very level-headed girl and knows how wrapped up I can get in my own head. She understands how I need facts to deal with anxiety and how I want the world to make sense forever and always. She also saw a loved one through their cancer diagnosis, treatments, and recovery, so she's got a good handle on what I'm feeling. As we were talking I broached the fact that I'm Fanny Price and that I listen to everyone else's problems without talking about my own. And I rambled on for a long time about all of this shitty emotional stuff that's going on and how ill-equipped I feel to deal with it.

When I finally wound down she said something that cut through all of the fear and anger and apprehension I was feeling.

You're now in a universe where 1+3=a pineapple. Rationality can't touch this.  

After I hung up on Michelle I saw my chat box with her flashing in the corner of the screen. I mulled over the second part of that phrase "Rationality can't touch this." She's right, of course. Over the past two months I've started to live in a universe were rationality and rational responses to things are, well, they're still options, but maybe not the best options.

It takes about eighteen minutes of struggling with my inner control freak before I can pick up the phone again.

"I'm an idiot," are the first words out of my mouth.
"I'll see you on Friday. The weather in New Orleans is supposed to be in the low 70s."

If I have to live in a universe where 1+3=a pineapple, where I'm losing control over my emotions and blowing up at people when they try to confide in me, where illness and death and uncertainty are constantly on my mind, I might as well also accept that I'm living in a universe where I'm willing to jump on a plane with my best friend at the drop of a hat.

Dissonance

It's Monday morning and I'm nearly apopleptic with rage.

One of my building neighbors has apparently stolen the communal snow shovel. Stolen the communal snow shovel after only shoveling out the two feet in front of their apartment stoop. After other building neighbor and I shoveled out their sidewalks twice yesterday. As a result of the neighbor absconding with the snow shovel, all of the snow is slowly being tamped down by bootprints, which will ultimately make it harder to remove. Although, in all reality, that's only about half of what has me so enraged.

I'm really salty because I have to wear pants to work today.

Let me backtrack a bit. We had a snowstorm here on Sunday. It was the first one of the season and because I didn't have to leave the house for anything urgent, it was a welcome reason to slow down. I spent the day drinking strong coffee, watching Moonrise Kingdom, listening to Curtis Fuller, and reading.

I've been working on Dracula since about August. I often have one book that I pick up and set down, usually on my Kindle, as I'm reading through other things. Dracula has been nice because I knew enough of the basic plot to be able to have long stretches between reading it without losing the thread of the story. I've really gotten into it over the past couple weeks for some unexpected reasons. As I was reading through parts of it, particularly Dracula's attack on Mina, I got a little, well, flushed. Like, romance novel flushed. I was a little embarrassed by my reaction and texted a friend who had recently finished the book asking if she had a similar experience. She was horrified, I think, and after calling her a repressed Irish Catholic, I moved on.

My friend Kerry introduced me to Dessa, Battlestar Galactica, Doctor Who, and is the one who convinced me to go into therapy. As a result, I roundly consider her the source and fountain of all truth. I also know that she read and loved Dracula, so I talked to her next. When I said something about my reaction and how Bram Stoker couldn't have accounted for 21st century kinks, she set me aright, telling me about coded eroticism in gothic horror. Armed with the knowledge that I wasn't a freak, I immediately indulged my inner lit crit nerd and spent the rest of the afternoon reading essays on eroticism in gothic horror (and cursing the fact that I no longer have easy access to literary journals.) After a few hours of mulling over and ruminating on said coded eroticism I started to have a series of conversations with some very smart, very hip feminists about sexuality, desire, and contemporary coded erotica not only in fiction but in media across the board. 

What I discovered is that a shockingly high number of my bright friends suffer pretty intense cognitive dissonance when it comes to attraction and desire in their own lives. What I mean, of course, by cognitive dissonance is that what we expect to turn our crank doesn't necessarily do the trick. And we all often get caught off guard by what actually triggers desire in us. For example, you're on a date with an objectively gorgeous guy but he doesn't know/care that Thomas Edison did his best to undermine Nikola Tesla's career. There's a part of you that thinks: "Big deal, this guy looks like Ryan Gosling." But there's another, louder part of your brain that shouts, literally shouts at you: "YOU CANNOT TAKE SOMEONE HOME WHO DOESN'T UNDERSTAND WHAT A DOUCHE THOMAS EDISON WAS TO TESLA. HE PROBABLY DOESN'T EVEN HAVE BOOKS IN HIS HOUSE." The cognitive dissonance is the break between what you think you're supposed to want (Ryan Gosling look-alikes) and what you want (science nerds.) Alternately, you read romance novels when you'd really rather be reading not-so-subtle power play in gothic horror.

These are, of course, examples that have never happened to me.

Now, about the pants.

Some context is required. If I am not outside being active or lounging around my house in my sweats, chances are over 95% that I am wearing a dress. I wear them to work. I wear them on first dates. I wear them running errands around town. I'm a dress enthusiast partially because they are oddly practical. Dress, tights, shoes, you're out the door without worrying about how well things match. Practicality is the easy to explain aspect of my sartorial choices. The other is going to require a roundabout explanation.

I have stunningly beautiful friends. Like, get asked if they've ever been considered being a model stunningly beautiful friends. Their thighs don't touch. They have hair that is so straight and shiny it looks like it comes out of a shampoo commercial. They have perfect teeth and tan in the summer and don't bite their nails.

And I've . . . well, I've got angles and lighting that work for me. I've also got a deceptively good sense of humor, I understand affect/effect, I'm well-read and a little brainy, and I like to think I'm on the charmingly crazy side of things rather than the "you don't want to stir that pot of crazy" crazy side of things (ever noticed how many gorgeous people are completely bananas?) And for years I thought that the humor and the high degree of literacy and relative-mental-normalcy were fine. That I didn't have any hangups from spending so much time with good looking people. Then I realized that I had to wear pants to work today and pitched a fit.

Wearing dresses for me started as a way of leveling the playing field, of dealing with my (apparently terrible) self-esteem and jealousy. After awhile it became less about leveling the playing field and more like putting on a suit of armor. If I dressed in a specific way people would respond to me differently. And wearing a pair of jeans or dress pants out made me feel less like a confident, funny, brainy awesome catch and more like the frumpy wallflower who always gets asked "so, tell me about your friend."

Oh, hello cognitive dissonance. Apparently you're not only a part of my sex life but of my self-perception as well.

While we were talking about Dracula and eroticism yesterday a friend said to me that Victorians understood more about sexuality and desire than we give them credit for understanding. The actual physical process of sex was certainly more of mystery than it is to us in 21st century. But their fiction managed to illustrate desire and eroticism in these coded, complex, compelling ways. In the 21st century we understand sex in its mechanics (thanks, internet!) but understand so little of what makes us tick, what informs our desire and our sexuality. As a result, something as idiotic and simple as wearing a pair of corduroys to work on a frigid day can suddenly become loaded and coded in ways we (I) didn't anticipate. What started as a clothing choice suddenly becomes an example of cognitive dissonance in a profound way.

I often tease a friend of mine because she has a deep, intense love for Victorians. On more than one occasion I've admonished her about gender and society, environmentalism  restrictive fashion, etc. during the time period. I'm chagrined to have to tell her that Victorian literature, with all of its sexual subtext and coded eroticism,  has managed to teach me something about not only my self-perception, but about my sex life as well.

Thanks, Bram Stoker.